Monday, January 27, 2014

Cars vs. wildlife: Cars keep on winning

It didn’t take long for the new year’s first car vs. wildlife milestone to
reach the headline-making point. The Associated Press report: “An endangered
Florida Panther (Puma concolor coryi)
has been killed in a three-car crash in southwest Florida.
“It's the first recorded Panther death of the year. Wildlife officials
say collisions with vehicles pose a significant threat to the rare cats.
Roughly 100 to 160 adult panthers remain in the wild. (Read a fact sheet
about the species at www.fws.gov/verobeach/MSRPPDFs/FloridaPanther.pdf)
“Darrell Land of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission says
the Panther fatally struck by a vehicle Thursday along Interstate 75 in Collier
County was a young male that weighed up to 120 pounds. Biologists believe he
was the same cat that has been roaming a Naples neighborhood recently.Florida Highway Patrol officials say minor
injuries were reported after the crash.
“Land says 20 panther deaths were recorded last year. Most of the Panther
deaths recorded in recent years are caused by collisions with vehicles.”
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service tracks such data because the Florida Panther
is among the most critically endangered native mammals and it has management
authority through the Endangered Species Act. The Florida FWCC helps simply
because it’s Florida.
While in Boise, Idaho, for three weeks of visiting my sister and her family
and our mother, tradition called for me to head east to the much smaller city
of Mountain Home – first, to visit an aunt and uncle (Bob, like me, is retired
from the Air Force; he’s a chief master sergeant, the top enlisted rank), and
then to shop at the Mountain Home Air Force Base “Base Exchange” (known to
retired and current military people as the BX).
To get there meant driving a stretch of I-84 that’s famous (or is it
infamous?) as the place where, just over the last decade alone, dozens of Barn Owls
have been hit and killed by passing vehicles.
The Idaho Fish and Game Department collects roadkill data on this owl
species because there, like Pennsylvania, it’s a species of special concern,
one that demands a conservation strategy of its own.
The plus side: Since moving to Vermont in 2011, I’ve seen only two roadkill
white-tailed deer along a highway shoulder. That’s a heartening anecdote since
roadkill whitetails were often-times found on this or that street in Conyngham
Borough through my two decades of residency there.
A fundamental truth about America’s century of love of the automobile is
this: The infrastructure (roads, streets, freeways, highways, driveways)
associated with the nation’s automotive fleet is directly responsible for
ongoing and deepening reductions in our natural heritage; what conservation
biologists call “biological diversity or simply “biodiversity.”
The principal issue is fragmentation – the fragmentation of otherwise
quality habitat by the construction of a road and the sprawl development that
often accompanies new strips of asphalt.
And for more than two decades now, the tailpipe emission from that fleet of
the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide has worsened what scientists have warned over
those same years is causing our planet’s climate to change.
This isn’t a far-fetched liberal fantasy, or something dreamed up by
progressives. It’s real and is happening. The Arctic cold snap that we
Vermonters just endured is weather, not climate.
In Boise, the daily three-mile walk
between my mother’s assisted living center and the hotel I stayed in gave me –
as walking always does – a chance to see the world one can’t get close to while
seated in the cockpit of a car, SUV or truck. I coined the term “carbon dioxide
factory” to describe the daily mishmash of traffic jams – some of them
extending down Cole Road or Fairview Avenue or Milwaukee Street for two-plus
miles at a hack.
An addendum: Boise, like many other municipalities, does a lot and spends a
lot to make life better for cars. But what about people who choose to walk or
bicycle?
Yes, Idaho’s capital city does seem to have more bicyclists per capita than
any metro area in Luzerne County, Pa. And it was especially heartening to watch
cyclists riding on snow-and-ice-covered bicycle lanes on the busiest arterial
streets (see the list above).
But Boise is especially emblematic of the environmental and societal ills
that always accompany a city’s reliance on private automobiles. On each of my
three treks to The Peregrine Fund’s World Center for Birds of Prey (10 or so
miles south of the metro area), I passed through a space-time continuum known
by the nation’s planning and zoning officials as “sprawl.”
The high desert habitat that once widely separated city from a part of the
Great BasinDesert has been paved and
built on to the very political (not ecological) boundary of federal public
land.
And it was reliance on the private car that made it possible. Our fellow
Americans who choose to live in this and other asteroid belts of sprawl must
drive their car, SUV or truck to complete the most mundane of household chores,
like buying a half-gallon of milk.

Crank your car’s engine to life and
it too becomes part of the carbon dioxide emissions factory.

“About 19.4 pounds of carbon dioxide
is produced for every gallon of gasoline combusted.”

For advocates of conservation
focused both of habitat (the land) and wildlife,“Present-day protected areas will not be
enough to help wildlife survive the coming impacts of climate change,” states a
release from the Wildlands Network. “Conservation biologists now believe that
the only way to accommodate the needs of wildlife as unpredictable climate
patterns emerge is to protect, restore, and connect a larger mosaic of habitat
and vegetation types – much of it outside the outlines of today’s national parks,
monuments and wilderness areas.”

“The
National Survey of Fishing, Hunting, and Wildlife Associated Recreation found
that 77 percent of the U.S. population enjoys some form of wildlife-related
recreation, and a 1987 poll sponsored by the President's Commission on
Americans Outdoors found that ‘natural beauty was the single most important
criterion for tourists selecting outdoor recreation sites.’ Independent of
recreation and tourism, proximity to open spaces has been found to raise the
value of residential property by as much as a third in some cases, raising
property tax revenues as well.”

If you walk to your workplace and/or
walk to the food market, congratulations for doing your part (i.e., burning
calories, not a fossil fuel). If you’re walking is limited to, for example,
getting from your front door to the garage door, we’ve got a lot of work ahead
of us.

About Me

Alan Gregory is a writer, specializing in natural resource and conservation policies, players and issues with occasional sorties into the realm of politics. He’s also a naturalist, but is not a biologist, having flunked his first college biology course before switching his major to journalism.
He was born in Massachusetts, but his family moved soon after to Oregon, then California and on to New Mexico before landing in Idaho. He’s been hiking forests, bogs and wetlands in his home state as well as New England, the Adirondacks and Pennsylvania, where he hung his shingle since 1989, the year he departed active duty in the U.S. Air Force (only to log 16 more years as a reservist, retiring in 2004 as a lieutenant colonel).
Alan’s been writing a conservation column for a daily newspaper in eastern Pennsylvania for nearly two decades. He’s done volunteer work for a bunch of conservation organizations, including Hawk Mountain Sanctuary in Pennsylvania, The Nature Conservancy and the North Branch Land Trust near his former home of Conyngham, Pa.